June 2007

Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Diana Oblinger of Educause is currently visiting China, and in a recent post about just how many people there are involved in Higher Education in China she notes: "Distance education in China also takes on amazing dimensions. Two million students are enrolled in their distance education programs. The day I visited Beijing Normal University, historically a teacher education institution, they were conducting in-service training for 10,000 teachers." Wow! Lots of other interesting tidbits in the post.

Of course, the Sloan-C Foundation, in their Online Education in the United States, 2006 survey, reports that, "Nearly 3.2 million students were taking at least one online course during the fall 2005 term, a substantial increase over the 2.3 million reported the previous year."

Monday, June 04, 2007

Laurie has a thought-provoking post wondering if the concept of "library services for distance learning" has died. She cites primarily the lack of participation in regional and national distance education interest groups (CLA and COPPUL here in Canada, and the OFFCAMP listserve). She and I briefly kicked around this question last week, and one group I didn't consider is the ACRL Distance Learning Section - is that more active, or does it follow the same trends noted by Laurie? Looks like they got 270 respondents to a membership survey a couple of years ago - that's pretty good! If ACRL DLS is more active, what's the secret of their success? Is this niche only big enough for one such group? Any thoughts? Leave them here, or with Laurie, if you would :-)